With fanfiction.net having a couple of glitches in the server that sent me on a nasty trip of paranoia that people absolutely hate me enough to have my account deleted, I've had an awakening of sorts. So, it turned out it was just a glitch in the system and it's been sorted (bravo to support, those guys are ace) but it had given me a big push back.

I have no backup of my fanfics, and I've got quite a lot of fanfics. When I realised that I might have lost years of work, hours of merciless writing, days and weeks worth of time spent plotting, all in less than a second, it made me detach myself from my work and kind of brace myself for it mentally. It would have been like losing a part of myself. Any writer who has accidentally hit the delete button or had their work somehow lost in cyberspace will know this feeling of having lost something you could never recapture. Sure, you could rewrite it - you are the author, after all, and your stories are extensions of your being. But you'll never get it quite the same as it once was. It loses that special element of raw emotion that you first wrote it with.I'm digressing.

Like I was saying before I threw myself off course, I distanced myself from my work so that I wouldn't have an emotional breakdown. I'm still a bit detached from my writing at the moment after the initial terror and then relief of the glitch, and it's given me a new pair of eyes to look with.

I was ranting about how Enji has stolen the limelight in A Futile Second Chance (FSC) and how I was going to wrap up his scene/story before shifting the focus back to Dante. Now I've realised just how much I was babying that story. It never even occurred to me that I could cut out Enji's story completely and just move back to Dante, because I ended the last chapter on a note where I could go in either direction. As the author, I feel the need to show Enji's side of things - probably because I spent so much time writing for Enji that it would feel like a waste not to. As a reader, I'd lose interest when everything is all about Enji and there's not enough Dante. The fic is about Dante being forced to take Enji in and uncover the secrets behind the kid, after all. Enji's had his chapter or two of fame and served his purpose in that way.

So I'm cutting out Enji's bits - however much research and thought I put into making his first encounter with Vergil wicked. It's cut. It's gone. Bye-bye. I'll put those useless scraps in my Untold Tales folder.

Now I just need to get back into Dante's head and start cracking at the next chapter for FSC. :)

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C.Smith

I'm a writer. My goal is to become a novelist and an author of the next best-seller.But until then, I will simply remain a writer.